European retailers publish their return rates by brand, OCZ has consistently been #1 by a wide margin, sometimes having as high as one in five (that's 20% for those of you following along at home) return rates for some models, the brand as a whole has been at around 8% for almost two years now. They're ticking time bombs. By contrast, intel, samsung et all generally have a return rate around 2% which is standard for retail items in general. Something is obviously very wrong. Also you should note that OEMs do not touch OCZ products with a 20 ft pole, you can only buy them at retail which should be a huge red flag.

It was because they were cheap. Very cheap. Unfortunately they were also very unreliable, and if there's one thing that people do not forgive, it's losing their data.

That was the big problem - the high failure rates. OCZ drives consistently were amongst the fastest drives, but any rational person would see that the numbers are so big they're meaningless. I mean, if you had to choose an OCZ drive with 500MB/sec reads and writes, or a more reliable one with 400MB/sec read and write, well, what 20% loss in spe

There are three industry standards of ssd failures:one is samsung drives, >33% of the market and hardly any failuressecond one is the rest except Sandforce usersthird one is Sandforce and all OCZ drives.

I would have thought Intel held the standard for the best SSD in terms of quality? I absolutely only use Intel SSD in servers as they're the only enterprise grade SSD I trust. As for OCZ, I have 8 in a pile on my desk at the moment (all 60GB ones) and I know 2 of them don't work and 6 probably do - but I can't be bothered trying to figure out which is which. They have been pretty bad, I would agree.

Intel are high-midrange (in terms of quality and performance) in both enterprise and desktop flash storage. Samsung has a very strong presence across the board due to reputation, very good performance (substantially better than Intel in production gear) and many of the vendor-branded enterprise drives (HP, NetApp, EMC, etc) have Samsung internals.

When I bought my current desktop's SSD (Samsung 840 Pro), the only other vendor with a drive even remotely close in performance was OCZ. Googling for "OCZ Vertex4 problems" quickly put that possibility to rest. At the time, Intel wasn't looking like they were bothering to keep up with performance on the desktop, but they're always been reasonable quality-wise.

I also considered 840 Pro, because I assumed that "Pro" means that it has capacitors, but no, it has not. Absolute performance is misleading alone. It must be considered together with reliability and consistency of performance. These three often represents trade-offs. It is easy to create a drive which is very good in random IO: use a large write cache on the drive without capacitors, and lie to the OS about sync. Manufacturers have done this previously, maybe they do this today, they do not talk about the

For example, Sandforce's engineers came up with an ugly, performance-killing hack that allowed the drive to avoid corruption if it were powered-down mid-write so they could officially claim that the ultracapacitor (*) was "optional" in "cost-sensitive applications". OCZ built drives without the ultracap, then had Sandforce furnish them with firmware that DISABLED THAT SAFETY MEASURE to avoid killing their drives' write performance in benchmarks.

To be blunt, Sandforce probably deserve to be tarred with the OCZ brush since they were actively complicit in that, but the fact remains that the problem here was caused by overriding the safety measures built into the controller rather than the controller itself...?

That said, the association has still put me off buying any Sandforce-based SSD.

(*) Which I assume was intended to provide enough power to complete the write normally. I'm also assuming that this "ultracapacitor" must be significantly more expensive than the bog standard types we're familiar with, whose cost would be negligible.

Intel uses Sandforce controllers in most of their current consumer SSDs. The 520, 330, 335, 525, 530, and 1500 are all Sandforce drives, with the 335 being Intel's current "mainstream" drive. Apple also uses Sandforce controllers in their Macbook product line, although they dual-source with a Samsung controller I believe. From all indications, neither Intel nor Apple have seen SSD failure rates higher than average. This tells me that most of the bad rep Sandforce got was purely because of OCZ's stupid antic

In reference to the "ugly hack", you'll likely find ugly hacks in any SSD controller.

True, but although the poster clearly had disdain for it (*), the "ugly hack" wasn't the target of his criticism per se.

What he *was* criticising was the fact that OCZ (with Sandforce's collusion) wanted to cheap out and not use the cap, but weren't prepared to accept the performance hit required to use it reliably under those circumstances, so blatantly ignored reliability to get performance on the cheap.

In other words, they had the old choice of "fast, cheap, reliable- pick any two", did so, and ended

Their problem was that they tried to engineer their own SSDs and become a major player. Before when they were just doing RAM they basically bought the chips from someone else, copy/pasted the reference DIMM design and stuck their own heatsink on it.

Their early SSDs had a lot of firmware issues, and they handled them badly. They also did douchbag things like reducing the capacity of existing products without any indication or model number change when they figured out that they hadn't left enough spare space

Yes, everyone is assuming that OCZ went under because their drives were rubbish. I'd say that was the most likely cause too, but it's still (a) an assumption and (b) won't be the reason they went under in itself. No-one so far has actually answered that question!

What I mean is that companies don't go bankrupt because they sell rubbish- they go bankrupt because of the *financial consequences* of selling rubbish. (*) In particular, I'd like to know...

You are basing your opinion on a sample of one single drive. That's quite a large standard deviation. If you look at defect rates from the larger retailers, over 20% of OCZs SSDs sold have been replaced due to catastrophic failures during the warranty period. This is not limited to a small time frame or a single model, but it's been so consistently since they started selling SSDs.

Numbers for the latest generations have not been conclusive yet, since a lot of those are still in warranty and they could go up

Was that the type of dream where you're in an exam and someone comes in and steals your pencils and you chase him down the corridor, but the corridor is the one from the office where you had your first job except that when you leave at one end you realised you've re-entered at the other side and there's no exit and the person who stole your pencils is now chasing *you* and you run and run and run, then you realise that the person chasing you looks like Guy Pearce when he used to play Mike in Neighbours and by waving your hands you get your pencils back, but you only have 15 minutes of the two hour exam left and it's for Portuguese Literature which you never studied in your life and also your OCZ SSD drive keeps failing and corrupting your data?

The warranty is a legal obligation, and one a company would have a responsibility to fulfill, and if the company is bought by someone else, it becomes their obligation.

Sure, if you wanna face an arbitration panel hand-picked from corporate lawyers.

Anyway, it doesn't say the drives will be purchased by Toshiba, just the controller technology.

When a company goes bankrupt and another company picks its bones, the first thing to go by the wayside are things like pensions, guarantees, municipal contracts and similar agreements. Toshiba's lawyers will get them out of those warranties faster than a drunk sophomore gets out of a prom dress.

You might think so, but it sure didn't work for fujitsu now did it? Warranty coverage and "who picks it up" varies by where you live, in Canada, I got cold hard cash for every drive I sent back to them as they failed.

Speaking of Toshiba and Canada... I live in Canada, and bought a Toshiba laptop in America after being assured by Toshiba (I called them) that the warranty was international and that I should have no problems at all getting it serviced if there was a problem. The text of the warranty also said as much. The only caveat, they said, was that I'd have to pay the shipping costs out of my own pocket, which was expected.

Fast forward a year and a half, and my laptop needs service. I call up Toshiba Canada, and not surprisingly they won't touch the thing because of where it was purchased. So then I call up Toshiba USA, and... they tell me their repair depot will refuse any packages shipped from outside the US. In fact, Toshiba tells me to find an American friend to ship it to and then have them ship it to Toshiba...

Incorrect. Warranties are considered unsecured liabilities. Once the company files for (Chapter 7) bankruptcy they stop honoring warranties just like they stop paying debts. The company's assets are sold and creditors are repaid in a set order. Unsecured debts are absolutely dead last and are generally never paid (after all, if they could have paid them they wouldn't likely be filing bankruptcy. Assets sold in bankruptcy are free from any liens or claims. Toshiba would be under no obligation to warranty any OCZ products, as they would have simply purchased their assets.

those expanded warranties they introduced to compete with Samsung came to mind. I wonder if they were being sincerely offered in the first place, or if they were just a gamble against what time they had left.

Most likely a sincere do-or-die attempt, they probably hoped for enough sales through that to turn things around. Whether that hope was realistic or they were just grasping at straws I don't know, either way the attempt was free and a slim chance to save the company beats doing nothing and going bankrupt for sure, at least from OCZ's perspective. They might have burned a lot more customers that way, but it reminds me a little of an "Ask Slashdot" about a small CEO/investor introducing hellish work hours and

I assume you are talking about the US. In the EU your warranty is with the vendor and is for a minimum of two years. If the drive fails the shop you bought it from must handle the warranty, even if the manufacturer is long gone. You can choose to directly to the manufacturer if you like and they allow it.

In my experience with storage devices if either the shop or manufacturer goes out of business the other one will usually honour the warranty. I had an Intel SSD from a shop that vanished and Intel replaced

Unless Toshiba actually agrees to assume the liabilities of OCZ (and WHY would they do that?) then no, the obligation to cover old products is not transferred. If a building contractor goes belly up and you buy his assets (materials, vehicles, tools & equipment, unsold inventory, client lists, etc.) that does not make you responsible for work he did in the past. Now, "if" you keep the brand alive you would most likely have to stand behind previous commitments, but again WHY would Toshiba do that? Toshiba is solid and OCZ is on fire. Toshiba will gain new IP and physical plants and resources and OCZ will be ash. Shareholders will get pennies on the dollar, customers will get screwed without lube. For warranty inquiries, contact the bankruptcy trustee.

Unless Toshiba actually agrees to assume the liabilities of OCZ (and WHY would they do that?)

Only one reason comes to mind - in order to preserve OCZ brand name. This brand is still associated with crazy fast drives. People in the industry know this is due to OCZ blatantly lying to customers and advertising compressed data speed, but perception of unwashed masses remains.Of course OCZ is also associated woth total lack of RMA support, and most people that had to go thru RMA never bought OCZ again.

The warranty is a legal obligation, and one a company would have a responsibility to fulfill, and if the company is bought by someone else, it becomes their obligation.

It depends on how the company was bought. Once it hits the bankruptcy court everything is up to grabs, and warranty coverage is a debt. Generally a company that buys it 'stock and barrel' will end up honoring the warranties, but it's not a guarantee.

"The warranty is a legal obligation, and one a company would have a responsibility to fulfill, and if the company is bought by someone else, it becomes their obligation."

That would be nice. However, if the sale is structured as a partial asset acquisition, rather than a sale of the whole company as an entity, it may or may not be true. The details are brutally complex and varied; but it cannot be safely assumed that a few tedious 'obligations' (especially to a class of very small claimants, who are unlik

Back when OCZ was a memory company, they provided really excellent service the couple of times that I had to deal with them. And lifetime warranties for their RAM. They were also pretty much the only good option available in Canada that wasn't way too expensive. I'm genuinely very sorry to see them go.

Let's be honest here, OCZ customer service could never have been as bad as Toshiba.

I have never had a Toshiba warranty/customer service problem and all of my home computers have been Toshiba since the early 1990s. Even my first one, a used T-1100, they sent me a still shrink-wrapped fresh DOS copy when I needed it. My only gripes have been with places where I bought one, not with the manufacturer.

Let's be honest here, OCZ customer service could never have been as bad as Toshiba.

My experience has been that Toshiba makes total shit computers (in terms of reliability, durability, service life, and driver support); but their SSD business does a lot of OEM work for just about anybody selling computers with SSDs inside. The sort of buyers who get really, really, really, touchy if a given component supplier ends up being responsible for a lot of warranty incidents. If they are doing that successfully, they can probably handle 'boring, but reliable' at any rate.

Their drives don't have a high failure rate! They're not unreliable! It was all based on a single study that showed a high return rate. That was because the morons at OCZ released them with beta level firmware that made the first batch of 3 and 4 series drives not be recognized 100% of the time by many BIOSes. I built over 50 computers with OCZ SSDs and about 40 of them had to be flashed to the latest firmware before they operated correctly. After that, zero out of 50 came back in 2 years so that means zero failed. They used 9000 write cycle flash memory instead of, for example, Kingston HyperX 3K's 3000 rating. They had an internal, firmware-based TRIM style sweep in case your OS didn't support TRIM too. They were one of the best drives out there.
Unfortunately, I hate them because they decided to "stop being competitive" and single handedly drove up the price of SSDs basically by price fixing. Their drives went up 50% in price overnight. That was such bullshit, they deserve bankruptcy.

But they're not incorrectly working 80% of the time, they're incorrectly working once, fixed, and then they work for the rest of the products life.

So they magically fix themselves?

If I buy something, I want it to work out of the box. If it didn't work out of the box 80% of the time, I'd call it 'unreliable'. I wouldn't care whether I can download some program from the Internet to fix it, you'd already have lost me as a customer.

I build PCs for a living and have since the days of The Shat selling VIC 20s with his TJ Hooker hair and if "Windows is almost 100% unreliable" for you then 1.- You haven't touched Windows since Win98SE, or more likely 2.- you sir are a moron who clicks on every "punch the clown and win an iPad" ad on the next and clicky clicky through every EULA you get from any dodgy site. So which is it?

No. I do not enjoy finding work-arounds or bug-fixes for broken-as-sold hardware that I paid good money for. I'm not interested in "accomplishment" from building a PC because it is menial unskilled labour despite what a bunch of nerds might want you to believe.

I must have gotten some of the messed up drives you were supposed to. I bought 3 OCZ SSDs. All three different sizes, each purchased a few weeks apart. Within a year, and fairly close in time, all three died. Died as in DEAD, with no warning or indications of a problem. Not recognized by BIOS, not flashable, one smelled like burnt electronics, DEAD. OCZ happily replaced all of them. But I figured...this is either an unlikely coincidence or their drives suck. Rather than figure out the answer to that, I bought Crucial and Intel SSDs and all have been running for more than twice as long as the OCZ SSDs with no issues.

I disagree. I've had several friends(at least 4 off the top of my head) that have bought OCZs. None of them lasted 6 months without having to do an RMA. One friend had 3 RMAs in about 9 months. Despite having 3 months left on his warranty he went with Intel(because of my recommendation) because it wasn't worth his time to continually have to restore from backup to a temporary drive while he does the RMA.

Even in forums I hear people talk about failed OCZ drives regularly. Sure, there's the occasional Samsung and Intel in there. But OCZ sure is mentioned FAR more frequently than the other brands. I'm not convinced that their market share is 90% to offset the number of users that complain about failed disks.

Personally, I don't care if they used 1-million write cycle flash memory instead of Kingston's 3000 cycle memory. If every drive I've had second hand experience with has to be RMAd in less than 6 months something is horribly wrong and I'd be avoiding that product or brand. There's alot more to a drive than just the number of write cycles. Poorly written SSD firmware could easily make a drive with a very long lifespan be abnormally short due to write amplification. So feel free to keep talking numbers, cause the comparision of write cycles is only a very small part of what makes an SSD reliable(or not).

In my opinion OCZ has undoubtedly made some bad models. Are they all bad? Probably not. But, it doesn't take much to earn a reputation for being crappy. And once you've earned that reputation it's going to take some serious convincing to get people to spend money on your product again. In my case, they'd have to give me a drive for free to prove that they really are just as reliable as the 3 Intel drives I've had in my 3 main machines that haven't failed in 3 years+ of use.

Regardless of how well or how poorly an item sells, regardless of a company's reputation, and regardless of what you and I "think" about their product, if significant quantities of their product is being RMAed that is going to kill the profits of that product. If its a very high failure rate it might bankrupt the company. OCZ has some products that have been claimed to have a 40% return rate during the warranty period. Oh look, OCZ is filing for bankruptcy. Coi

Must not buy much memory. I've had Kingston, Corsair, Crucial, Muskin, Patriot and G.Skill all DOA out of the box before. Last bad stick was a G.Skill eco, though they're my favorite brand especially their low voltage memory.

I use Intel SSDs, period. I'm not a fan of Intel at all and really want AMD to succeed such that we have some compititon in the marketplace. But when it comes to SSDs Intel holds the best non-failure rate that I've found.

I've paid more but on my own personal rigs as well as every client's, I've not had any failure. And they are fast too. I mean duh, they are SSDs!

But whenever I saw OCZ I saw marketing. I mean I guess they had some good drives using reliable chips and good controllers but from what I saw it was all about the marketing. Which leads me to my post's question. How many engineers did they really have at that company that worked on things vs the amount of MBA marketeers.

In short I never saw OCZ as a serious company. They were not a Corsair or some other startup that had real desires to make good hardware. Rather they had a lot of marketing push and very little else. The level of return on their SSDs was super high and once I saw that it told me all I needed to know about them. Anyone can make some RAM and slap on some crafted aluminum heatsink onto it. Not everyone can make a SSD.

Then again, Intel's 330 is notorious for not getting along with T60/T61 Thinkpads [intel.com]. It happened to me as well - something about its power management didn't get along with my T61; it would randomly freeze the system for about 30 seconds, and no combination of registry hacks and/or driver upgrades or downgrades would fix it.

The workaround was to replace the drive with a Samsung 840. No more freezeups. The Intel drive went into one of my desktops, where it has worked flawlessly.

With stock firmware from Lenovo, SSDs are unsupported on T60/T61's. PERIOD. The are some third party firmware hacks that promise more stability. But, in general, it's luck of the draw on those machines.

Had an OCZ power supply start failing with random computer crashes due to +12V bus causing dips due to load and 3 out of 4 purchased SSD OCZ Vertex 1 and Agility 1 drives failed with bad sectors and unreadable data.

I still have one of their still shrink wrapped and unpacked OCZ Vertex 1 40GB drives that nobody wanted to buy on eBay twice it was listed that I don't dare curse anyone with so it just sits in my closet. Will have to take it out of it's misery one day and shoot it or something but I certainly w

Thank GOD a couple weeks ago I RMA'd the 3rd drive that had failed in less than year. All 3 were Vertex 3 120 Gig. So at least now I have 1 that should be good for another 6 months. The support really was good with no questions asked really on all 3 drives. But what does suck is I bought 3 of them and ALL 3 DIED. I knew after the 1st one died within 60 days I was going to have issues. Over the years I had issues with Ram compatibility and I just knew the drives were going to be iffy. But they are so damn fast and the price was decent [1st one was 300 bucks, 2nd one was 220 [bought about 3 months later] and lastly the 3rd drive was just over 150 bucks] Now they sell for like 80 bucks. After the 3rd one died about 4 months ago or that I was never going to buy an OCZ drive again. I finally broke down and got an RMA after my #2 drive that was replaced about 6 months ago started tossing errors that I had better RMA the drive. Glad I did.

Based on reviews, my best guess is that you want to buy SSDs from manufacturers that own wafer fabs, because they have control over manufacturing, and their reputation for chip fabrication would suffer if they put out poor-quality SSDs. I'm thinking of Micron/Crucial, Intel [marketwatch.com], Samsung [eetimes.com], Toshiba, Sandisk [eetimes.com], among others.

Is this true, or are there more important factors to consider when choosing an SSD brand/model?

I have an OCZ RevoDrive, bought early 2011, and it works like a charm. The only problems I have with it is when installing a Linux distribution from scratch, but after figuring it out once it works very well.

Maybe I'm one of the lucky few who haven't had a problem with reliability?

OCZ is/was a horribly managed company, but IMO one of their other core problems is/was that they arn't a flash memory (NAND) manufacturer... Difficult to compete on price when their major SSD competitors (Intel, Samsung, Crucial/Micron, SanDisk) all have their own fabs...

Happy *IOPS*! I am *squirting happy SATA*!Why? The reason. Orz have the drives that *dissolve* or burst into several.*Capitalist friends* have come to Toshiba *playground*.Why are you coming to this?Orz are just Orz.

Maybe we shouldn't, considering that they had exactly one faulty model (barracuda 7200.11), which they replaced in about six months with with 7200.12 which did not have the problem. It died in exact same way (controlled failed in a specific way). I had that drive, and it died in that exact way. It was promptly replaced by a 7200.12 that I use to this day. My parents still have a pair of seagate's 7200.7s that have been working for almost a decade under heavy RAID load. No problems. That is average seagate q